I walk, therefore I am

What is a ramblanista? Are we, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the metafictional in search of the metaphysical? Or are we just putting one foot in front of the other, just like all the other common-or-garden hikers who flock to the countryside of a Sunday afternoon, only in a more pompous and pretentious manner. Put down the pen and put on your boots, that might be a better maxim. Must an act so basic and intrinsically simple be encumbered with an ideology, must we dissect and analyse it till we’ve completely lost sight of our raison d’être? Well, yes and no. Not perhaps a philosophy but an aesthetic, one that serves for the urban as much as it does the rural. And an aesthetic that’s as physical as it is cerebral. By all means, let’s wax lyrical about the lie of the land but let’s only sit down and put pen to paper – or rather, fingertips to laptop – after we’ve waded the mud and hurdled the gates: filth is fun. Because that’s what it’s about. Walking with an attitude, a subversive act, cocking a snook at order and authority. It’s walking as a theology of liberation, the liberation of the imagination, looking at the landscape with a hermeneutic of suspicion. We walk to explore, to discover without conquering or imposing ourselves on the landscape. We look out, we look in and we look beyond. We are walking interrogatives, always wanting – no, demanding – to know the where, the when, the who and the how. But most of all we want to know why? And we walk to get lost; we walk ourselves off the map and into a world of aesthetical free-will. There is no set route; if the look of the path takes our fancy we simply follow it without a thought to where it goes. The heart rules the head, decisions are made on the basis of raw emotion: the ramblanista loathes logic and reason. She – or maybe he – will have an innate hatred of the tedious and the mediocre, for her – or him – the ordinary is extraordinary. There is no such thing as the mundane, we reject monotony and all its evil works. And we keep on walking because there’s always – always – something new around each and every corner.